Queer/Trans K’s

Data/Science

Data applies static labels to international relations which recreates heterosexist violence and homonationalism

Sjoberg 14 – Ph.D., University of Southern California School of International Relations and Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Florida [Laura, Queering the “Territorial Peace”? Queer Theory Conversing With Mainstream International Relations, International Studies Review, doi: 10.1111/misr.12186, Wiley] AMarb

“Mainstream” IR theorists (Desch 1998) have argued that critical theory has limited utility if it provides a more complicated explanation for a result a simpler theory could predict. Gibler’s theory is simpler than my account, and my alternative account is, in positivist terms, unprovable with available (and perhaps even attainable) data. I suggest, though, using these arguments to halt the engagement is intellectually and politically problematic. This is not least because Butler’s account of performances of gender and sexuality, applied to performances of “settled” borders, suggests that Gibler’s notion of the benefits of territorial settledness is limited. Butler argues that proscribing stability and “an exclusive identification” for subjects which are “as every subject is” multiply constituted is both practically and normatively problematic, the “simultaneous production and subjugation of (heterosexual) subjects.” As distinct from feminist analysis of the role of “stabilized” gender identities on the production of subjects (for example, Tickner, 1992) and poststructuralist analysis on the inherent instability of the concept of sovereignty (Walker 1983; Ashley 1984), Butler’s contribution suggests that the (heteronormative) labeling and valorizing of “stable” borders, whether or not it contributes to a decrease in military conflict among states, functions to “enforce a reduction and paralysis” on the multiply constituted identities within that (actually unsettled) territory, simultaneously producing the sovereign state and subjugating those produced within it (Weber 1998a). Butler’s work suggests that it is possible that both the fantasy of territorial stability and Gibler’s rearticulation of it are themselves acts of regulatory, heterosexist violence. A fifth insight that reading Butler onto the “territorial peace” provides is that it is not only state sovereignty that Gibler’s approach naturalizes and reifies, but also the democratic peace thesis that Gibler critiques from within. While proposing a different causal mechanism for the democratic peace result, Gibler’s work might be seen through Butler’s lenses to enact a (always yet never queer) “resignification of norms” of the democratic peace, given that it does not question the normative value or empirical utility to democracy, either generally or as a part of efforts to mitigate conflict among states. In this way, Gibler’s work might be described in Butler’s terms as a “denaturalizing parody” of the democratic peace which “reidealizes” its norms “without calling them into question.” Queer theorists have suggested that such resignification provides affirmation of existing norms masquerading as critique, injuring the subject more than the previous regulatory regime (see argument in Halberstam 2011, about failure). Rather than critiquing the fetishization of democracy, then, the “territorial peace” might reify it. Perhaps this short engagement functions to suggest the potential productivity of (always fraught) conversations between “mainstream” IR research and queer theory. While not all of the insights derived from Bodies That Matter for The Territorial Peace are unique to queer theorizing, and Bodies That Matter is a small subset of queer theorizing, this brief engagement suggests that both queer methodological lenses and the substance of queer theorizing could be useful interventions in mainstream IR. To that end, the point of this engagement has not been to condemn Gibler’s “territorial peace” or valorize Butler’s notions of the performance of the materiality of sex and the regulation of sexuality. Instead, it is to suggest that the logics of queer theorizing when inserted into the research programs of “mainstream” IR produce not only recognition of ambivalence, pretension, and “drag” in IR theory, but also a hybrid, plural group of insights that could be fruitful for both approaches. Here, the logic of the materiality of sex in Bodies That Matter can identify vagueness, ambivalence, and even alternate causal connections within the “territorial peace” research program. Engaging “territorial peace” research with Butler’s framework suggests both macrotheoretical problems with the work and more micro-level changes to variable operationalizations—so “territorial peace” researchers reading Butler might make the research better both on its own terms and as it resonates with queer logics in IR research. I recognize there is a distinct possibility that this brief discussion will not transform the “territorial peace” research program. If it does not, there remain benefits to discursive intervention (Hamati-Ataya 2012). If it does attract a two-way engagement, its results could be creative and productive for both approaches. Perhaps this is what Butler meant by seeking to engage in “inhabiting the practices of ...rearticulation.” If not, perhaps it could be.

Approaching IR from a critical perspective re-politicizes it- their so-called objective claims are circular logic which produces disciplinary violence

Barkin and Sjoberg 15

(J. Samuel Barkin is a professor in the Department of Conflict Resolution, Human Security, and Global Governance at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Laura Sjoberg is a leading scholar of feminist international relations and international security. Her research focuses on gender and just war theory, women’s violence in global politics, and feminist interpretations of the theory and practice of security policy. “The Failures of Constructivist Theory in IR” Written for presentation at the 2015 Millennium Conference. cVs)

We argue that knowledge cumulation in IR is a fantasy reified by paradigmatic clusters and the mimicry of neopositivist research standards and practices. The ‘evidence’ of ‘knowledge cumulation’ in the discipline comes as much from the ritualized practice of research behavior as it does from any true or genuine notion of knowledge cumulation. That ritualized practice at once is institutionalized as success and institutionalizes the need for research success. One has ‘succeeded’ in the enterprise of political science/IR research by cumulating knowledge, and the cumulation of knowledge as a standard of success in turn makes success possible and desirable. It is our suggestion that it is crucial to at least consider the possibility that what counts as knowledge in the field, in particular research programs and more generally, is performative – where standards are set by their utterance and repetition rather than by some external ‘objective’ standards of good science (narrowly) or good research (more broadly). The iterative performance of standards of the measurement of knowledge has the impact of rendering uninhabitable the methodological, epistemological, and political space that falls outside of those performed standards – quelling dissent. To escape this recursive loop, we argue that it is important to see the possibility that knowledge cumulation is not, and should not be, a given in IR research. We argue this from two perspectives, that of explanation and that of silences. With respect to the former, the idea of knowledge cumulation is firmly grounded in a neopositivist understanding of social science, in which the role of theory is to collate observed empirical regularities across cases, or what Waltz calls laws (Waltz 1979). But most constructivisms, and (arguably) all critical theories, do not ground themselves in this philosophy of social science. “Cumulation” for them, therefore, is a term without clear conceptual content. It simply is not the role of any reflexive theoretical approach to social science to generate cumulative knowledge as it is understood by neopositivsts. The critical-constructivist synthesis, understood in opposition to the neo-neo synthesis, distracts from a particular theory’s internal conditions of possibility by introducing incompatible conditions of possibility drawn from competition across syntheses. As such, any acknowledgement of the idea of cumulativity from within specific exercises in reflexive IR creates the grounds for necessary failure within those exercises. The question of silences requires elaboration at greater length. As a foundation for this argument, we contend that it is as important to see what we do not learn from IR analysis as traditionally understood as it is to see what we do learn (perhaps even more important). Our silences tell us more about the state of knowledge cumulation in the discipline than looking for standards that tell us what we do know. We derive this understanding from a long tradition of feminist research methodology that emphasizes how important it is to search for where women are omitted, excluded, kept out, and not mentioned in order to understand how women are constituted, where they are, and what happens to them in global politics (Keller, 1985; Tickner, 1988; Charlesworth, 1999; Kronsell, 2006). Accordingly, we ask on principle what variables does the research program not take account of? How could accounting for those variables change the analysis? We are arguing that there are visible omissions (like the variables that a research program fails to incorporate), and invisible omissions. Invisible omissions are those that are unhearable by a research program – normally left out or ignored by both the researchers that form the core of the research program and their critics. Unlike its visible omissions – variables that its scholars and their critics have added to, re-operationalized, expanded on, or suggested the inclusion of – invisible omissions are unhearable within particular scholarly boundaries. Leveraging this analysis of silence, we explore the argument that the discipline’s standards for knowledge production are political and performative rather than given, objective, useful, or founded. We mean performativity in the sense that Judith Butler uses it (Butler, 1990; Butler, 1993), particularly as she talks about it going hand-in-hand with a Foucauldian notion of disciplining (Foucault, 2003; Edkins, 1999; Steans, 2003),¹ where “performativity cannot be understood outside of a process of interability – a regularized and constrained repetition of norms” which resonate as “ritualized production” (Butler, 1993: 60). This frames performativity as a “specific modality of power as discourse” (139), where the politics of the signification and the politics of the sign meet, an act of territoralization, of production, of installation – which does not have to be alone, singular, or unidirectional. Since performatives are their own referent (159), they proliferate as manifestations of the power underlying them, and interact relatively on the basis of that relative power. This makes statements like “this is good science” and “these results are robust” signs without referents used to discipline (Baudrillard, 1993). The invisible disciplining nature of the performative standards of knowledge cumulation is half the story of Butler’s understanding of performativity. The other part is who is excluded by claims to knowledge cumulation (generally as well as in specific paradigmatic situations), what is left out, and on what axes. These disciplinary standards (both in the traditional and Foucauldian sense) make invisible their own impossibility.